The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In an item rental system, items that have been received from customers after rental must be processed so that some are available for a subsequent rental, and some are put away for a short to long-term storage, or eventual disposal or destruction. In a conventional system involving disc media rental items such as DVDs, received or returned rental DVDs are sorted and put away in racks or other organized long-term storage for subsequent picking for future customers, or for other storage. When a customer order calls for a particular returned rental DVD, a copy or unit of that DVD is picked from the put-away location and prepared for the customer. Thus, typically all returned DVDs are put away before subsequent picking for order fulfillment.
However, this approach may result in putting away too many DVDs that represent unpopular titles that are unlikely to be rented by any other customer within a reasonable time. Further, the approach may result in storing too many DVDs that are likely to be needed immediately for rental to another customer the same day or the next day. An example of a DVD rental service provider is Netflix, Inc., Los Gatos, Calif. (www.netflix.com).